Riot’s new anti-cheat engine developed for their latest shooter VALORANT is growing more and more infamous for invading users’ privacies with every passing day. This time, claims have been made that Vanguard is meddling with not only the input devices of players’ computers, but also with the cooling software to control fans’ airflow.
A post made by Reddit user u/hugometeo claims that his keyboard and mouse entirely stopped working as a result of Vanguard. Not only that but he further mentioned that he “started smelling hot plastic” and realised that his GPU was overheating at 90 degrees due to Riot’s ‘revolutionary’ anti-cheat disabling the cooling software in his PC.
Lots of other players also seemed to have encountered similar issues, as some of them appeared in the comments to speak up about the problems Vanguard was causing. Some of them were particularly annoying to be witnessed as a user.
The post and the comments made one thing clear, none of them were enjoying the behavior the anti-cheat system of Riot was putting up. A lot of VALORANT players also reported to have resorted to uninstalling both the game and the anti-cheat as a last measure.
However, the only ray of hope amidst this tense situation was perhaps the fact that a Riot dev came across the thread and replied to it. Paul “Arkem” Chamberlain – the lead of the anti-cheat team behind Vanguard – assured players in the thread that they are “working on ways to make the experience better.” He admitted that the “current notification pop-ups aren’t as good as they could be” but he also mentioned that they’re planning to give players more control over how Vanguard works. As a TL;DR note he said that users can expect improvements before the official launch of VALORANT, which is scheduled for summer 2020.
Not too long ago, there were also reports of Vanguard blocking access to CPU temperatures, and the latest update only seemed to add fuel to the fire.
